Hey creative people! Would you share here some thoughts on speeding up rendering times with AE projects.

Here are some thoughts:

1. Does a better video card improves rendering times? Asking Mark about this, he suggested the GTX295 and the coming 300 series improves quite a bit rendering times.

2. Tweaking AE preferences, like cache or multiprocessing. How much on cache size? Does this function really helps AE rendering engine?

3. Dual boot, installing Windows on a separated partition / disk only for working with AE…and tweak windows for performance disabling unnecessary services or so.

4. Enabling/disabling the Open GL rendering.

5. Also I’m curious to user reaction to RAID /SATA storage options. Does this helps?

6. Is there any way to make sub-compositions or make a more efficient flow in your comps that speeds up rendering?

Thanks for sharing your knowledge.

Hi Elreto…

1. Not sure. Depends on the machine and the card. I’m hoping that for Mac, once Adobe brings out its first post-Snow-Leopard release for Mac that video card resources will be heavily used by After Effects… and that it might be able to use more than 3gb RAM too! For PC, I don’t know.

2. I’ve never noticed much of a difference with cache etc. Multiprocessing makes a big difference. I like to leave it off while I’m working as it causes a delay in RAM previews. But I turn it on for rendering and also for working when projects get heavy duty. If you have a utility where you can watch what your processors are doing, then you can see the difference it makes. Some effects are not multiprocessor enabled though and that can mean having this option turned on makes little difference. You should see the biggest improvements if you have lots of RAM .

3. After Effects is a system resource hog. It’s worse than many 3D programs. Turn as much off as possible before doing a big render.

4. Never sure on this one. I’m not keen on Open GL. Maybe it’s just my video card, but I find it unstable.

5. If you’re doing rendering where not too much processing is required, but you have loads of video layers…i.e. loads of data to read in per frame, then your bottle neck is going to be disk read times. In this situation, a nice 4 disk RAID helps, but make sure it’s hooked up to your system with SATA II or something. If it’s going via USB 1 .0, it doesn’t matter a jot how fast those disks are spinning!

6. Yes. This is a big topic. Precomp where you can and using collapsed transformations can help. Generally, think how After Effects thinks. If you need three identical particle system, each tinted a different colour, make the particle system, pre-compose it and then tint three different instances of the precomp three different colours. If you have a separate particle system on three different layers, you’ll have three times more processing to do than the single precomped particle system. For particularly heavy duty files (in terms of rendering time) I usually pre-render the most difficult layers… I also render to file sequences, not a Quicktime… that way I can halt renders more easily part way through, render over sections more easily if there are any problems in parts of the render. I only convert to QT once I’ve got everything how I want it.

Extra stuff…. don’t use files with pixel dimensions bigger than they need to be. Very high res graphics slow everything down. Resize in Photoshop first.

Yep, I use OpenGL with my 295, and it does speed up AE pretty well. Cuda tech is built into the card and while I wish I could have picked up a quadro, I wasn’t able to pay the price I paid for the whole computer on just the video card.

Also, RAID configs do help but you lose redundancy so backing up in crucial. A friend of mine has two VelociRaptors from Western Digital. Smaller drives (more expensive) that spin at 10,000, he set them up in a RAID0 configuration to increase render/write time and its noticeably faster from this. But then after the render is finished he immediately backs up the render to other, slower, internal drives.

Also, you may want to consider getting an eSata card, which allows you to connect Sata hard drives externally without having such an impacting speed drop that you get with USB connections.

Yep, I use OpenGL with my 295, and it does speed up AE pretty well. Cuda tech is built into the card and while I wish I could have picked up a quadro, I wasn’t able to pay the price I paid for the whole computer on just the video card.

Also, RAID configs do help but you lose redundancy so backing up in crucial. A friend of mine has two VelociRaptors from Western Digital. Smaller drives (more expensive) that spin at 10,000, he set them up in a RAID0 configuration to increase render/write time and its noticeably faster from this. But then after the render is finished he immediately backs up the render to other, slower, internal drives.

Also, you may want to consider getting an eSata card, which allows you to connect Sata hard drives externally without having such an impacting speed drop that you get with USB connections.

Thanks Mark. I have an eStata card and use Sata hard drives externally….I’m considering to get a faster HD like and a configuration like your friend.

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